Tag: Technology and Freedom

The Union for the Public Domain is asking for help in surveying national governments about their (the governments’) positions on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty. The UPD is looking for volunteers who are willing to contact the appropriate representatives of their national government, ask the representatives a series of questions provided by the UPD, record the…

James Grimmelmann reports on the recent Digital Cops conference at Yale. It’s a typically Grimmel-rific effort, both entertaining and insightful.

Ernest Miller points to a draft treaty being considered by the World Intellectual Property Organization. It’s a truly remarkable document. And I don’t mean that in a good way. Here’s the most amazing part, from Article 16, Alternative V: 2. In particular, effective legal remedies shall be provided against those who: … (iii) participate in…

Dana Blankenhorn at Moore’s Lore has some interesting discussion of the lawsuit between American Blinds and Google. Here’s the background: When you do a Google search, the results page gives the search results on the left side of the page, and a few ads (marked as such) on the right edge of the page. The…

The New York Times reports that the U.S. government has dropped it objection to U.S. people copy-editing scientific papers whose authors come from countries that are under U.S. trade embargoes. Previously, the government had interpreted such copy-editing as a violation of the trade embargoes, an offense punishable by up to ten years in prison. Though…

A lawsuit was filed last week, challenging the FCC’s Broadcast Flag decree. Petitioners include the American Library Association, several other library associations, the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, the EFF, and PublicKnowledge. Here is a court filing outlining the petitioners’ arguments.

A California state appeals court has ruled in DVD-CCA v. Bunner, holding that the DeCSS program is not a trade secret, so a lower court was wrong to order Andrew Bunner not to post the program on his website. DeCSS, you may recall, is a program that decrypts data from DVDs. It’s posted at hundreds…

Kim Weatherall notes that in the recent “Free Trade” Agreement between the U.S. and Australia, the Aussies agreed to implement a DMCA-like law, and to extend their term of copyright. Needless to say, these are both bad ideas. Kim offers a long post recounting the history of this issue in Australia. I only wonder what…

In today’s New York Times, Jim Motavalli writes about people who tinker with, or replace, the software controlling their car engines. Some people do this to improve engine power or fuel efficiency, and some do it out of curiosity. In a now-standard abuse of terminology, the article labels this as “hacking”. Worse yet is this…

Next week in my “IT and the Law” course, we’re discussing cyber-trespass. Reading the course materials got me to wondering whether BayTSP might be a cyber-trespasser. BayTSP is a small company that works for copyright holders, monitoring the contents of P2P networks. Among other things, they query individual computers on the P2P networks, to see…